Biography

Chris Brooks is Professor of Finance, Deputy Head of School and Director of Research at the ICMA Centre. He was formerly Professor of Finance at the Cass Business School, London. He holds a PhD and a BA in Economics and Econometrics, both from the University of Reading. His areas of research interest include asset pricing, fund management, behavioural finance, financial history, and econometric analysis and modelling in finance and real estate. He has published widely in these areas, and has over a hundred articles in leading academic and practitioner journals including the Journal of Business, Economic Journal, Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Empirical Finance. Chris is Associate Editor of several journals, including the JBFA, the International Journal of Forecasting and the British Accounting Review. He was a member of the RAE2008 Accounting and Finance sub-panel and is a member of the REF2014 Business and Management sub-panel. Chris acts as consultant for various banks, corporations and professional bodies in the fields of finance, real estate, and econometrics.

He is Course Convenor of the Securities, Futures and Options, and Introductory Finance modules and also teaches on the PhD programme.

Chris is probably best known as author of the first introductory econometrics textbook targeted at finance students, “Introductory Econometrics for Finance“ (2014, Cambridge University Press), which is now in its third edition and has now sold over 50,000 copies worldwide.

Grants

Medieval Foreign Exchange c.1300-1500

The ICMA Centre has recently won a Research Project Grant worth almost £200,000 from the Leverhulme Trust for a three-year project beginning in January 2012 and entitled "Medieval Foreign Exchange c. 1300 - 1500" (grant number RPG-193). The research team, comprising Professor Adrian R Bell and Professor Chris Brooks, and Dr Tony Moore, will examine in detail the workings of the markets for foreign currency trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For more detail see: www.icmacentre.ac.uk/medievalfx

Credit Finance in the Middle Ages: Loans to the English Crown c. 1272-1340

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) have awarded Dr Adrian Bell and Professor Chris Brooks a major research grant worth just over £350,000 to investigate the early and innovative use of credit finance by a succession of English medieval monarchs.

The study will examine in detail the credit finance arrangements used by Edward I, II and III from both a historical perspective and also utilise the approaches and models developed recently for modern-day sovereign borrowings. The project will employ one Research Assistant for three years, and the team will work on a number of publications as well as the production of the transcriptions and translations of many original sources

Modern Finance in the Middle Ages? Advance contracts for the supply of wool

Dr Adrian Bell and Professor Chris Brooks were awarded £45,000 from the ESRC for a unique interdisciplinary project. Their research attempted to push back the boundaries for modern finance into the middle ages - by investigating forward contracts between Cistercian monasteries in England and Italian Merchant Banks during the later half of the thirteenth century. The monasteries frequently sold their wool up to ten years in advance for prices agreed on the date that the contract was signed. These contracts were written by hand and in medieval latin and have survived in governmental records, housed today in the National Archives at Kew. This was the first time that such contracts have been subjected to the rigours of the techniques of modern finance. Could it be that today's financial market whizkids have a thing or two to learn from their ecclesiastical predecessors? The project analysed how efficient these early financial markets were and also produced an edition of the sources to stimulate further research into this fascinating history.